


When She Walks Through with Butcher's Knives

by goldfinch



Category: Mr. Robot (TV)
Genre: Emotional Manipulation, F/M, Light BDSM, Marriage of Convenience, Missing Persons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-04-29 01:12:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5110937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldfinch/pseuds/goldfinch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tyrell wasn't anything when she found him, twenty-four years old, the ink still wet on his Master's degree. He was working in a cubicle, wearing headphones seven hours a day; he gave himself carpal tunnel syndrome two weeks after Joanna first heard his name.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When She Walks Through with Butcher's Knives

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hangingfire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hangingfire/gifts).



> To hangingfire: Can I just say how glad I am you chose the Wellicks, and Joanna in particular? She's such a great character—one of my favorites, next to her hot mess of a husband—and I was so pleased when I saw the prompt you'd given me. I hope I've fulfilled it to your satisfaction. Happy Yuletide : )
> 
> Title cribbed from Heiner Müller's _Die Hamletmaschine_.

Tyrell wasn’t anything when she found him, twenty-four years old, the ink still wet on his Master’s degree. He was working in a cubicle, wearing headphones seven hours a day; he gave himself carpal tunnel syndrome two weeks after Joanna first heard his name.

“Are you going to do this forever?” Joanna asked, leaning against the dividing wall between his cube and the next. She was wearing a cream skirt, and a blue top to match her eyes. She was on her way to see her uncle in the corner office, her uncle who would give her nothing when he died. Whatever she was to make of herself, she had to do it on her own.

Tyrell looked up. “I don’t know,” he said. “I enjoy it.” She watched him look her over, watched interest bloom in his eyes. “I don’t believe we’ve met, though. What’s your name?”

“Joanna Olovsson.” She extended her hand, and he took it, and she held his longer than perhaps was necessary. His skin was cool and dry; his eyes were the color of the mountain lakes her family had vacationed at when she was a child. Isolated places, nothing but trees and mountains and the reflection of the sun on the surface of the water. She preferred the city, preferred civilization and cleanliness, order, but she had never forgotten the color of that water. Acid blue and diamond-bright. Like something from a dream.

He was sitting in his chair, and she, standing, was a good two feet taller than him. Before Joanna’s mother died she used to say: if you voice a thought, it becomes true.

Joanna smiled, very politely. "You can do better than a cubicle."

And Tyrell’s face opened with joy like a flower.

 

 

 

The problem with Tyrell, she quickly found, was that he was a child. He required attention and encouragement; he had to be told exactly what to do, or he wouldn’t do anything. But he was intelligent, and he noticed things, even if he didn’t always know what to do with those things afterward. Joanna did. What Tyrell noticed and relayed to her over the dinner table became the rungs of the ladder she built to pull herself from the anonymity in which she found herself. Her uncle was dead within three years. As she'd suspected, he left her nothing.

And Tyrell was still only in lower level management. She had been under no illusions that this would be easy, but in marrying Tyrell she had expected a more effective tool. He was too complacent, and although he was getting better, it was taking too long. At this pace, he would be CEO of E Corps at ninety-eight.

Something had to be done.

She made the blindfold and ties herself out of old silk scarves, and that evening, after dinner, she waited from him in the bedroom and told him what to do. She had expected to hate it. She didn't. With the blindfold on, and her arms and legs immobilized, she became a creature of pleasure, with no external desires. She thought not of the endless path of her life, or the obstacles that had to be overcome, or how Tyrell was turning out to be more of a disappointment than she had imagined—she thought only of the hand between her legs, of the mouth against her breasts, of the roll of pleasure she couldn't fully express when she was bound.

"Do you miss it?" she asked afterward, stretching her unbound arms out over the pillow. Tyrell had untied her carefully afterward and examined her wrists for bruising, but there was none.

Tyrell turned his head. "Miss what?"

"Being invisible. Working in a cubicle, surrounded by walls. Being nothing."

He didn't flinch, but it was a close thing. Of course he was still almost nothing, but she had raised him up a little, and set his sights on something still higher. Hopefully it would be enough, but if it wasn't, she would be there to prod him forward every step of the way.

 _Of course, there is always another option_ , she thought, examining her husband’s jawline. Tyrell had always been sentimental.

He did love her, after all.

 

 

 

Tyrell bought her flowers when they moved to America, big bouquets once a week, a physical demonstration of his devotion to her. She appreciated that. And the flowers were beautiful, really, peonies and sunflowers and tiny white flowers she didn’t know the name of, lilies that smelled like sweet death, roses in all different colors. She put them in vases and left them there until they withered and went brown and crackling with age, until all the color had gone out of them, but by that point Tyrell had brought her new ones.

In New York, he was promoted. Then he was promoted again.

“Why don’t you go out more?” he asked one afternoon, home for his lunch break. He had brought her French food from a restaurant in Manhattan that she liked, and they ate together at the breakfast table, using the silverware she had picked out at Tiffany’s when they first bought the apartment.

“Perhaps,” she said, taking a bite of _blanquette de veau_ , “you should be getting more dinner invitations. I should meet your boss’s wife. You haven’t said anything about your junior vice president of technology in a while, either.”

“He doesn’t like me,” Tyrell said, taking a bite from his own plate. He preferred Swedish food to French, he had said. He preferred salads and fish and simple pastries.

“Isn’t he rather old?” Joanna asked.

Later she would look at him and wonder if some of it wasn't her fault. If she hadn't planted the seed. If not for what happened to the junior vice president of technology, who had a heart attack while running with Tyrell several weeks later, then for what happened to Sharon Knowles. Tyrell was impulsive, and incapable of approaching things in any way other than head-on. He was smart, but not clever, and not particularly patient either. He had asked Joanna to marry him four months after they met.

But it was absurd for Joanna to feel in any way responsible. She had told him to befriend the man, that was all. She had told Tyrell to be successful, and then laid out for him the best way to achieve success. She had told him to tie her down, and he had forgotten what it meant to obey.

 

 

 

Everything collapsed with sickening suddenness. When he left, giddy and strange as he shoved papers into his briefcase and talked again about God, about the people and powers that lay over them, Joanna knew something was wrong, but she didn't know what. She assumed it was something to do with Sharon Knowles, about the impending prison sentence Joanna could delay, but not avert. She assumed he meant their child, whom he obviously loved.

And then he was gone.

And then their bank account was frozen—then all the bank accounts in the world were frozen. But she didn't need money to feed her child, sandy-haired and perfect, only the second thing in the world she had ever loved. So she drank too much wine and waited for Tyrell to return, the way he always had, and when he did not, she tipped her wine glass neatly onto the floor. It shattered, glass fragments flying against the walls and her ankles and beneath the lip of the kitchen cupboards. Tyrell had broken a vase like this. He had broken a great many things over the years, during his tantrums, which Joanna learned to ignore the way she ignored sobbing children in the supermarket. She looked at the glass, and did not see the appeal.

Once she had cleaned up the mess, and quieted the baby, she put on a white dress and a white coat and went out onto the street. The sun was high, and several streets away she could hear somebody screaming.

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me on [tumblr](http://furs-and-gold.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
